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Death Drive: Vampires in Anne Rice's the Vampire Chronicles Chi Tsai

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Death Drive: Vampires in Anne Rice's the Vampire Chronicles Chi Tsai Death Drive: Vampires in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles Chi Tsai, National Normal Taiwan University, Taiwan The Asian Conference on Literature & Librarianship 2014 Official Conference Proceedings 2014 0298 iafor The International Academic Forum www.iafor.org In principle, vampire is the fantastic creature of immortality, which mysteriously attains energy by drinking blood from living creatures. This imagined creature is often viewed as the symbol of blasphemy for it suggests human blood as one kind of its dietary supplement. The inhumane setting challenges the teaching of Christian tradition, yet it also arise the clash of human-centered civilization from the agency of killing and surviving. The publication of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series marks the contemporary cultural penetration of vampire popularity. In the essay, I choose five novels of The Vampire Chronicles series: Interview with the Vampire(1976), The Vampire Lestat(1985), The Queen of the Damned(1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), and The Vampire Armand (1998) to expound the issue of death drive among Rice’s vampire literature. I would apply Freudian and Lacanian conceptions to illustrate the vampire myth. Then, I would discuss Rice’s vampire plots with the notion of death drive. In The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice dramatizes her vampire origin with pre-Christian background, an accident of the Egyptian King Enkil and Queen Akasha created the legend of vampires. Blood drinking became the essential for physical survival, and the monstrous feeding brings ecstasy to the vampires. In The Queer Space of the Drive, Teresa de Lauretis argues that drive (Trieb)‘leans on (lehnet an), the satisfaction of the need for nourishment, cleanliness, warmth, and so forth.’ In Rice’s books, we can figure out the need for blood drinking is an innate drive for the vampires. The description of the blood-drinking spirit can be viewed as the feature to the issue of drive. It wants more like you. It wants to go in and make blood drinkers of others as it did with the King; it is too immense to be contained within two small bodies. The thirst will become bearable only when you make others, for they will share the burden on it with you.(406) It shows that the repressive drive would create the feeling of anxiety; only the instinctual repetition can remove the excitement. Lauretis points out drive would ‘finds physical expression’, yet the death drive (Todestrieb) seems to ‘have no physical delegates, no psychical repression’. Death drive is a Freudian term which firstly indicates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a psychical force ‘whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.’ It works ‘essentially in silence’. He later built up the conflicting notions of death drive and Eros to contend the idea of living actually relies on the coexistent drives of self-preservation and self-destruction. This statement presents that the nature of being is confined within time and space, for the idea of self-preservation and self-destruction is basically found under the assumption of the stage of ego development. According to Freud, the word ego means the psychic function of conscious awareness. If the ego accepts the concept of life and death, it means the ego believes in the notion of being exists in limited time and space. For example, in The Vampire Lestat, the vampire Marius told Lestat that “I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.”(466) Here, Rice marks her vampires with philosophical and psychoanalytic depth by providing the premise of immortal body and the needs from the mortals. In The Queen of the Damned, the soul of Baby Jenks depicts vampires as “poor souls of all the Dead guys locked in indestructible matter unable to grow old or die.”(57), the description implies that vampires are the immortal beings constantly finding the reasons to exist. Once the vampires acknowledge the idea of being, they may identify selves as enormous egos because of their superman power such as senses, strength, and the eternal life. However, their strong self-awareness would relatively generate the feeling of loneliness. In The Vampire Lestat, the vampire Armand depicts his despair with the following lines: That he craved nothing, cherished nothing, believed nothing finally, and took not one particle of pleasure in his ever increasing and awesome powers, and existed from moment to moment in a void broken once every night of his eternal life by the kill... (304) The statement of loneliness announced that the autonomy of body cannot fully liberate the vampire; instead, the repetition of pure carnal pleasure would increase the lure of death. Or we can say that death drive disguise with the form of extreme stimulus. However, in The Vampire Lestat, the vampire Marius states vampires are made to “triumph over time”(469). He recommended Lestat to “live out one complete lifetime”(468) and make others as members of family. The suggestions express the subjectivity of vampire party derives from the process of self- objectification. That is, the notion of “making others” can construct the scope of ego. According to psychoanalysis, the symbolic meaning of “the other” is the unattainable part of life or the unconscious. Lacan ideally made more detailed identification by dividing the concept of “the other” into the little ‘o’ other and the big ‘O’ other. In Dangerous Supplements and the Envy of the Gaze, Patrick Fuery argues the Lacanian ‘Other’ as “the realm of otherness which is distinct from the subject”, and ‘other’ is “the objects of desire which manifest the realm of Otherness for the subject.” The saying that ‘the other’ as an object indicates the theory that ego views itself as a subject acquiring for fulfilling its need by the assistance from the object ‘Other’ through the form of desire. Desire contains the demand of instinctive need and love. In The Vampire Lestat, Marius reminded Lestat the criteria of choosing companions. The warning for the subject can be viewed as an advice on how to achieve self-foundation by perceiving the objectifying self from “the Other”. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them.(471) It suggests that love is the direct way to identify with self. Thus, we can say desire for the vampires of making companions originates from the calling for love. In other words, the vampire ego intends to make identification by pursuing desire of love. The companions seem to be the redemption of the vampires, but the ultimate way to make identification is to dissolve the notion of subjectivity and objectivity. In short, the vampires need to discover their nature with love, rather than chasing after the desire of love. Accordingly, we can figure out that Rice draws desire as an inevitable illusion for vampires. Yet, the illusional desire also presents the fact that vampire is aware of the discontent of being without love. In The Vampire Lestat, Armand viewed his vampire myth as the disillusionment. And when you first know about us, whether it’s through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. But that isn’t so. ……That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. (307) In order to become fully liberated from self-discontent, the vampires eventually intend to get rid of all the desire by seeking for death through their living. In fact, the tendency for death also belongs to desire, or we can say that death drive is the ultimate content for desire. The discussion of death drive and desire actually points out that real immortality doesn’t mean living without physical death. To discard desire is the minimum condition for immortality. Being a vampire cannot achieve real immortality, they are just imitations of mankind. We can say that the images of vampires in Rice's Vampire Chronicles are often viewed as the subjects, and their human victims are the objects of desire. That is, mankind is succumbed to the vampire species, which creates the uncanny effect to the readers. In “The Uncanny”, Freud defined the term ‘uncanny’ as “class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (825). The reason that readers sense the uncanny effect from vampire literature is based on the setting that most of vampires are not just living dead; instead, they are living legend because of possessing eternal youth, great fortune, and superhuman power. Nevertheless, being a vampire means being evil from moral aspect. So, why do people want to become vampires? In Interview with the Vampire, Louis, the most human of all vampires, says that one of the reasons he became a vampire was ‘wish for self-destruction’. He apparently regarded vampire as the embodiment of immortal death. The new world that he imagined would eliminate all the sufferings from human world. His first death drive, however, leads him to sense “sublime loneliness…through the world of mortal men”.(39) For the vampire Louis, the act of killing is “the experience of another’s life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood…It is again and again the experience of that loss of my own life….”(29) Based on Rice’s description, vampire is not an unfeeling corpse, but a creature that can recapture the value of life through killing. Armand, the vampire prince, reckoned Louis as the spirit of the nineteenth century, the age falling from grace and faith.
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